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This volume offers a survey of analyses of Gothic texts, including literary works, feature films, a TV serial, and video games, with a view to showing the evolution and expansion of the Gothic convention across the ages and the media. The temporal scope of the book is broad: the chapters cover narratives from the early and mid-eighteenth century, predating the birth of the convention in 1764, through Romantic and Victorian novels, to the contemporary manifestations of the Gothic. Primarily designed for graduate and postgraduate students, the book sets out to acquaint them with both the convention and different theoretical approaches. The studies presented here could also prove inspirational for fellow scholars and helpful for university teachers, the book becoming an item on the reading lists in Gothic literature, film and media courses.
List of contents
Contents: Anna Kedra-Kardela/Andrzej Slawomir Kowalczyk: The Gothic Canon: Contexts, Features, Relationships, Perspectives - Artur Blaim: Gothic Castaways: Dreams, Demons and Monsters in Early Modern Desert Island Narratives - Wojciech Nowicki: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey - Aleksandra Kedzierska: A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens's Ghostly Academy - Dorota Babilas: The Undead Queen: Queen Victoria's Afterlife in Gothic Fiction - Jorge Bastos da Silva: First-Person Noir: Murderousness and (Ir)rationality in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction - Ludmila Gruszewska Blaim: Faculty Gothic in the American College Novel of the 1990s - Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: Competing Genres in the English Country House: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - Jadwiga Wegrodzka: Ghosts and Their Stories in Children's Fiction - Justyna Galant: In the Bowels of a Gothic Microverse: Delicatessen as a Semiotic Palimpsest - Zofia Kolbuszewska: Gothic Automata and the Kunstkammer Island: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes by Quay Brothers - Marta Komsta: The Murder House, or the Archaic Mother in American Horror Story - Pawel Frelik: Gothic Videogames.
About the author
Anna Kedra-Kardela is Associate Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin (Poland). She published on metaphysical poetry, cognitive poetics, narratology, and the Anglo-Irish short story.
Andrzej Slawomir Kowalczyk is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin (Poland). His publications include studies in medieval drama, the supernatural in fiction, as well as utopia/dystopia in literature and film.
Report
«This book is concerned with Gothicism as a cultural category. The chapters discuss extra-canonical works representing uncharted fields within the domain of narrative fiction, film, and video games. The volume comprises original and illuminating studies, opening new vistas to the scholarly research into the Gothic.» (Prof. Joanna Kokot, The Warmia and Mazury University in Olsztyn, Poland)
«This collection will appeal to anyone - general reader or specialist, student or teacher or scholar - with an interest in the Gothic or even just a casual curiosity about it. The essays will expand readers' horizons as well as the Gothic canon, demonstrating to anyone who might not already realize it that the exuberantly undead Gothic mode continues both to entertain and to do the essential cultural work of conservation, subversion and recuperation.» (Prof. John M. Krafft, Miami University, Ohio)
